


Heart and Will

by Northisnotup



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Benzaiten Steel Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ancient Martian Artifacts, Character Study, Deus Ex Machina, Gen, M/M, Multiverse, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:26:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23240929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northisnotup/pseuds/Northisnotup
Summary: There is a world where Sarah shot the 'correct' twin.It is a world so close to this one you could almost see it, as if a doorway between worlds was left open - just a crack.In this world, in this now, Juno Steel has terrible luck with ancient martian artifacts.
Relationships: Benzaiten Steel & Juno Steel, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Comments: 29
Kudos: 174





	1. The Archway

**Author's Note:**

> This is an unbeta'd collection of shorts that are going to be very loosely connected. I do not know where they are going, what the update schedule is going to be like, or if I will update much at all!
> 
> But Ben and Juno deserve nice things - even if that nice thing is getting to joke about your trauma by threatening your once-dead twin with The Cain Instinct.

It’s only a rough, stone hewn archway in the middle of the Martian desert. 

Truth be told, Juno would much rather be anywhere else in the Universe - he’s had more than his fill of creepy, ancient Martian artifacts. But Buddy and Nureyev were both fluttering around it, Nureyev in raptures about the history come to life and Buddy as exited as she ever got over the doors trading an artifact like this will open. 

It’s just some defunct, abandoned Martian junk. 

Juno has to believe that. 

And he does. 

All the way up to when a sudden, strong wind starts to whip at his clothes. Through the panicked calls and frantic shouts to get back to the ship. From when a piece of the cliff the archway is nestled in front of breaks off and flies at his blind side, sending him stumbling, tripping, falling - 

Frantically, Juno grabs at whatever he can to try and stay on his feet. His hands rasp against rough stone. The jagged carved symbols bite through his palms but he finds no real purchase. 

There’s sand in his eye and coating his mouth and between one second and the next Juno Steel falls through the archway and crashes into the sharp rock on the other side. The harsh impact works with the whipping winds to steal the breath from his lungs and his chest shudders between wanting to protect his banged up ribs and wanting to gasp and struggle for what little air there is.

Juno Steel was the only person dumb enough to get this close to the archway. 

Juno is, very suddenly, not alone. 

There is a shape lingering at the edge of his vision now. A person shape on the other side of the arch that collapses under the strain of the storm. 

Juno squeezes his eye shut, refusing to turn his head and confirm what his mind insists the blurry, dark outline is. His heart pounds, demanding that he recognize the breadth of the shoulders, the cloud of dark hair pinned in neat, attractive twists. 

A large, rough hand grabs his arm, and still Juno refuses to look. He lets himself be pulled, pushed, shoved through the blanket of sand nipping at his skin like the death of one thousand cuts until finally, miraculously, it stops. 

Juno wheezes, the bass pounding his ears finally beginning to fade out as Rita’s hysterics begin to filter in. 

“No.”

Juno’s aching lungs seize up, cutting off in a choked gasp like some poor thing in its death throes. 

“No, you’re not here,” says the ghost that followed him from the archway. 

He couldn’t agree more.

He isn’t here. He can’t be. 

It’s THEIA. He never got away. This has all been a dream, a wonderful, terrible hallucination of growth and healing that he never lived because of course he didn’t. It was too good to be true. Even the hurts were never as bad as he deserved. 

“I don’t need you, Juno. You can go. I’ve been okay,” the ghost continues, calm in a way that people usually sound when they’re not calm at all but the illusion is all that is keeping them from just fucking losing it. "You're not here."

“He is,”

“He can’t be,” the ghost cuts in almost gently, as if reassuring a child that their nightmare will not follow them into the waking world. 

Juno keeps his eye closed and focuses on trying to kick his abused ribs into working properly. 

“Why not?” Nureyev. That's Nureyev's soft, coaxing voice. His 'mark' voice. The one he brings out when he wants you to spill all your secrets. 

“Because Juno Steel is dead," the ghost's voice shakes. "I’m sorry. I don’t know how you knew him, I don’t know what kind of…mass hallucination this is, but he isn’t here. He’s not real. I’m not -” the ghost cuts himself off as his voice loses it’s calm edge and gets high and tight, like he always did...

“Ben,” Juno sobs. He doesn’t mean to, he doesn’t mean to speak at all, or acknowledge the ghost in any way. 

“Don’t!” The ghost snaps, twisting fluidly, strong and graceful and somehow here. “You’re not real. I don’t know what you are, but you. Aren’t. Real." 

A silence descends only broken by the rough sobs Juno can’t swallow back and the increasingly laboured breaths of a ghost.


	2. Mirror Mirror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ghost of Benzaiten Steel has his say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is getting closer to the scene I started thinking about. The scene for which this fic was born. 
> 
> Peter Nureyev and the Ghost of Benzaiten Steel. 
> 
> Stay tuned!

Neither Benten nor Juno have ever been ‘huggers.' 

Even as children when they would crawl into bed together to weather out storms both literal and metaphorical they would sleep back to back, touching only enough to feel the other’s continued breaths. 

It’s taken about three days for either one of them to let the other out of arm's reach longer than it takes to use the bathroom. 

Benten in particular is not _clingy._ Juno used to joke that the only reason he was born first is 'cause Ben kicked him out of the womb. 

Juno, his brother, who is soaking up the contact like a plant that’s been without water for too long.

Which is just - wrong. The largest difference between them, Benten always thought, is that Juno doesn’t like space. He likes having his people close, nosing into his business and physically crowding him. To Juno, not letting him push you away is the ultimate form of love because it proves that you really do want him there. It’s why Sasha Wire, Ms. bossy extraordinaire and Mick 'Couldn’t Take a Hint if It Killed Him’ Mercury were his best friends as kids. The idea of Juno being alone, being left alone, after Ben…

It’s wrong. It’s just wrong.

But they can’t keep on as they are, either. The first two days were fine, necessary even. Sitting, sides pressed together, knees and shoulders knocking and words tripping over one another, apologies and explanations pouring like the cheap liquor they grew up on. 

Buddy, the ship's captain has swung by more than twice to shout through the door until one or the other heaves himself up to open it. She said she wanted to make sure her newest 'family member' was settling in, but she mostly kept her visible eye on Juno. Which, being honest, warmed Benten to this ragtag group that called itself a family more than any story Juno stuttered out. Lying both badly and obviously, tripping over details as though Ben would clutch pearls over his brother breaking even _more_ laws.

Today, Ben’s heart doesn’t punch out of his chest when Juno takes a shower, and the idea of opening one more prepackaged snack food instead of going to the fucking kitchen is turning his stomach. 

So he trips into the kitchen by literally tripping Juno, laughing at the squawk of surprise his twin makes and the way his glare pulls at the eyepatch that Benten…actually hates a little bit. Just a little. Even with the scar across his oft broken nose, Juno and Benten could look at each other’s faces like a familiar mirror, and the eyepatch is one large crack in that mirror. More than the perpetual way Juno slouches or the way Ben never learned to walk rather than glide.

These last two days have given them time to stop thinking of the other as a past, to refamiliarize old annoyances and frustrations that make someone a person instead of an ideal. Juno has to be bullied into taking care of himself but then takes absurdly long showers and steals all the hot water. Juno acts like make up and fashion are beneath him but will spend an hour getting the perfect ‘i-woke-up-like-this’ look. Juno reacts to people like a stray cat - picking favourites seemingly at random but with a definite preference for those who want nothing to do with him, leaning into contact if not outright demanding attention before suddenly shying away and lashing out. Juno talks during streams, convinced he can figure out the plot twist, mystery or who-dun-it before the show reaches its climax. 

Juno is….so much more annoying than Benten remembers. Mostly, what sticks out in Benten’s memory is his fire. He had a ceaseless, never ending drive to do more, to be better. He wanted more for himself and Benten and Oldtown and Hyperion City and Mars and he wasn’t shy about the lengths he would go to achieve that. This Juno hasn’t lost that. It’s different than Benten remembers it being, but it’s still there and Ben…feels like he is awake for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Awake and falling into bad habits. 

The tall, whipcord thin man who introduced himself with a name so obviously fake Ben refuses to remember or use it is already in the kitchen, and turns to them with a smile full of sharp teeth. His eyes linger on Juno for the few seconds before Ben steps in front of him and blocks the man's view.

Ben has always been…not possessive of Juno. That’s not quite it, but there is no better word for the way Ben has, and likely will always view Juno as an extension of himself. 

Juno is a little bit the same, the way he not-so-subtly thinks of Ben as better, if not the best. The Good Twin, the kind one, the gentle one, the one who deserves nice things. 

If Benzaiten was the heart of Juno Steel, then, like a funhouse mirror, Juno was the strength of will that powered Benzaiten Steel.

Juno is…very self centered, it’s the best and worst part of him. He hasn’t pressed much for the life Ben lived without him, and Ben is thankful for it. 

Juno has lived and left two careers over the course of their time apart. He has loved, left, and been left, he has fought for and against everything including himself, winning and losing in equal measure. 

Juno is a life lived and Ben is painfully aware of how he has stayed in the same bland apartment he moved into with Northstar's money shortly after putting his twin in the ground. Taught at the same studio, had shallow friendships and on/off lovers and has survived, but not lived. Not really. Not with a whole heart or much of a drive for anything at all. 

And by all the gods above and below, if that doesn’t paint a picture of just how much of Sarah Steel her son’s inherited…nothing will.


	3. Thief and Imposter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Benzaiten Steel vs. Peter Nureyev - Round 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just really love the idea of Ben hating Peter on sight because Juno has a Type and Peter is It.

"Juno, I forgot my earrings in your room," Not-Juno sighs.

Nureyev continues to take delicate sips of his now cold tea, the flimsiest of veils shielding how hungrily his eyes rake over the twin forms in front of him, bumping and jarring one another as they bicker. He's never seen Juno cook before, but the lady seems insultingly adept at it, handling the knife with skill and switching positions with his double when needed. Both of them move with a stilted kind of almost-harmony, just this-much out of sync. 

It's not that Nureyev cannot differentiate between the Steel twins. Exactly the opposite, actually. 

Nureyev has seen Juno attempt to embody an alias first hand, and the result is, honestly, a little embarrassing. The detective cannot be anyone but who he is, not even when he tries. It's ~~endearing~~ ~~attractive~~ ~~wonderful~~ annoying. 

To see Benzaiten Steel, even out of the corner of his eye, is a bit like a waking nightmare. This man-his-mind-insists-is-Juno does not move as Juno does, doesn't smell like Juno, doesn't sound like Juno and most unnervingly, does not look at Nureyev like Juno did.

 ~~Like Juno still does.~~

"Why, are you jealous 'cause my ears jingle-jangle and yours don't?" Juno shakes his head from side to side, the multiple looping golden rings in his ear lobes clicking together, barely audible over the bubbling and sizzling on the stove, the sounds of knife-edges confidently meeting the cutting board and Nureyev's own tea cup meeting its saucer with more force than intended.

He's changed. 

Nureyev is at once consumed with a horrid jealousy and a heartache so acute the tea sloshes over the delicately painted china from his shaking hands. Juno has changed so much, both in their time apart and in the short few days he spent holed up with only his shadow for company. His voice is light with a humor that, for once, is not a sharp edge aimed at his own throat. 

"You're the one who insisted I take them out, loser." 

"Because you can't sleep with them in, braindead. Go get them yourself."

"Like I can find anything in your rat’s nest of a bedroom."

"That's because you don't actually look!"

"When you stare into the abyss, it stares back, Super Steel. Go get my earrings!"

And the dance that started when the twins first came into the space Nureyev happened to already be occupying continues, changing from a quickstep to a waltz, one-two-three, one-two-three, Not-Juno stepping a quarter beat ahead of Juno, attempting to hide Juno's body with his own whenever he can.

"Benten, wh— Keep an eye on the stove!"

"I am!"

"Do you want your earrings or not?"

Until Juno is through the doorway, none the wiser. 

Nureyev would almost be impressed, if he wasn't furious. 

Not enough, apparently, for him to be hitched to this wagon of would-be do-gooders. Not enough, apparently, to suffer the slings and arrows of wounded, mournful looks from the lady who left him whenever he thought Nureyev could not see. Not enough, apparently, to attempt to put their shared history behind them and continue as distant but amiable colleagues. Now this graceful, unscarred, whole Juno-shaped-person-who-is-not-Juno is twisting to stare at him, cold and accusatory as only the Juno of his nightmares does. 

He allows the silence to linger, and Nureyev, unable to stand inactivity on a good day, feels every second that passes like a growing itch under his skin. 

He should have left. What good is a thief who cannot read the room? Whose heart overrules his head and who ignores convenient escape routes when they are offered? Juno's attention, for the most part, had been focused on the stove and his shadow. Of course there were glances. Juno has never been what someone would call subtle, and since losing his eye he has been even less so and it's not vanity to say that whenever they are in the same room that beautiful eye gravitates toward him. 

"Is there something you would like to say to me?" 

"Oh, just wondering if I could freshen up your cup, that cover's getting a little thin." Not-Juno smiles, and Nureyev has to hand it to him, that shining smile would be very convincing if Nureyev had not been so very familiar with the face it came from. Juno has a dimple on his left cheek that his shadow lacks. Juno has had dental work, likely from being punched as much as he has and some aspiring dentist 'fixed' the charming gap his mirror still carries between his front teeth. Close, but no cigar, as some are won't to say. 

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Nureyev demurrs, sliding his eyes delicately away from Not-Juno's imperfect features. 

"If we had more time, I'd be happy to prove that lie, but we don't."

Not-Juno's voice is lighter than Juno's own rough tenor. Sweeter. Nureyev works to keep his face pleasantly blank, full of the empty sort of tolerance someone might expect from a perfect stranger. "Hm, your sudden lack of accessory was a rather flimsy excuse." 

"Eh, runs in the family," Not-Juno rolls his shoulders expansively. "Since we don't have a lot of time, I'll get right to it," 

Nureyev braces himself, unsure of what is to come. 

"I don't like you." 

He waits a beat. 

And then another. 

"Is that all?" Perhaps Nureyev should have reined in the incredulity in his voice, the casual condescension he knows is leaking into the words. But as threats against him goes, it's not the most cutting, the sharpest, and far from the most actually threatening he has ever had. 

"It's all I need," Not-Juno chirps. He spins on the ball of his right foot, an elegant, practiced turn, going back to tending some of the sizzling pans of goodness knows what. "I don't like you, and you should stay away from my brother."

Oh! Oh that little — It positively galls. The idea that it is _Juno_ who needs to be protected from _him._

"I don't know what Juno may have told you as to what happened," he starts, clipped and sharp, words like chips of ice.

"Oh, he didn't tell me anything, but thank you for confirming there is something to tell, Mr. Conman. May I call you Mr. Conman?"

Nureyev finds he must make a conscious effort to unclench his jaw. He hasn't made a mistake so trivial in decades. "Must you?" He manages to grit out, instead of any of the other barbed words that want to spill over his poisoned tongue. 

He turns to brace a hip against the counter, and smiles in a way that Nureyev wants to flinch away from. A mean bearing of teeth that twists his face from Not-Juno into Almost-Juno. Could-Be-Juno. A Juno without the scars of a life hard lived. A Juno with both of his beautiful eyes, not lost to Nureyev's own mistakes.

"I like it better than the name you gave me," Not-Juno sing-songs. "Peter Ransom. Ugh, may as well be Thief Conman. It sounds better, don't you think? More honest." 

There are a good many things Nureyev would like to say to that. So many that they clog his throat scrambling for purchase while his brain desperately whirls, searching for something he can say that isn’t painfully _revealing._ Not-Juno is at once not at all as perceptive as Juno and moreso. He has those same piercing dark eyes that peel back the many layers of names and mannerisms shielding Peter Nureyev from view. 

Unlike his lighter half, Not-Juno does not like what he sees. 

And honestly, he hasn’t said anything that hasn’t been...fair, if not true. Thief Conman might be the best descriptor of himself Nureyev has ever heard. After all, who and what is Peter Nureyev? What has he ever been? A lie told by an old man? A collection of names as two dimensional as the man they were said to belong to? Someone lying. Someone faking. Someone tired. 

“Okay, so I couldn’t find your earrings, but that is not because my room is a mess, it’s because I am pretty sure you left them in Rita’s room so I brought you some of mi—” Juno cuts himself off as he rounds the corner into the galley, that sharp eye taking in all the little details that Nureyev would rather he did not. He scowls, full lips pouting and a familiar heavy line appearing between his thick brows. 

Nureyev dreamed about kissing that wrinkle for months. 

“If what’s happening in here is what I think is happening,” Juno starts warningly, “it better not be.” 

“Oh, re-lax Super Steel, we were just talking.”

“Ben.”

“Ju-no,” Nureyev feels his face twist and makes an effort to smooth his features into something more banal. He _hates_ the way Juno’s name sounds in his double’s mouth. “we were just talking. You never answered me about the tea, Thief.” 

Well, never let it be said that Nureyev did not know how to take a cue. He sets his cup down, begins the motion-actions of smile and politely refuse when...

“What did you just call him?” Juno’s voice coils like a wire ready to snap, none of the ease from earlier present and Nureyev feels almost sorry to have robbed that away, however unintentionally. 

“Well that’s who he is, isn’t it?” Not-Juno laughs, and to his credit, if Nureyev had never heard his real laugh, it would not have sounded fake.

For the second time today, one of the Steel twins moves to block his view of the other. Juno, a goddess of protection with shoulders squared and arms crossed steps in front of Nureyev and Nureyev's last view of Not-Juno is his eyebrows arching upward, plush lips going slack in surprise. “Benten, I cannot believe I have to say this to you.”

“What?”

“Be. Nice.” 

And just as before, they’re off. Talking over one another, cutting each other off and but somehow conversing as if they were having a perfectly normal conversation. 

Nureyev was, effectually, an only child. He has never had cause to really reflect on that, nor be happy about it. 

Until now. 

“How could you say that to me? I’m the nice one, everyone says so!” 

“You are so two-faced,”

“Me?”

“Yes, you,”

“ _You_ are saying that?”

“I’m at least mean to their faces, you wait til their back is turned,”

“It’s called being polite, Swoops,”

“It’s called being an asshole, Benten,”

“Look, it’s not my fault you have awful taste in dates!”

“That’s not — we’re not — shut up!” 

Nureyev's heart lurches in his chest, even as his stomach sinks. 

“You have been attracted to the wrong kind since Cypress Delaney broke your nose when we were thirteen and you spend the next three years in love with her.”

“Okay first of all, shut up, second of all you don’t know anything about relationships.”

“I know you suck at them!”

“Really? I don’t even have to have lived with you to know the closest you’ve gotten to a relationship a three month period of exclusivity where you saw a guy ten years younger than you and when he said ‘I really like you,’ you replied ‘I really like fucking you.’” 

Not-Juno makes a choked off noise of pure offense and the kitchen falls into an uneasy silence, broken only by the sputtering of the pans on the stove. Both Steel’s are breathing hard. Juno taking short, hard breaths through his nose and Not-Juno smacking his lips and sighing. 

“I’m sorry.” / “It was six months.”

Their voices layer again. Juno’s deeper, more sorrowful, painfully vulnerable. Gorgeous. Not-Juno’s lighter, forced, cracked open and tender. 

Juno takes another uneasy step forward, another, and Not-Juno turns with him, hip to hip, beginning to tend to whatever is beginning to smell _divine._ Their movements at first tentative but beginning to fall into rhythm. Soft spoken apologies and explanations float under the noise of the ship.

He could stay. Strain his ears for whatever scraps he might glean. 

But Nureyev knows better. If Juno would like an audience, he knows, has known, where to find him. 

On silent feet, the Thief Conman heaves himself out of the seat he feels as though he has been stuck in since the two stumbled into the space he had been occupying, and disappears.


	4. Conspiracy Files 27: The Steel Twist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jet does not believe this to be necessary. 
> 
> From the observation of the last half hour and Jet's own knowledge of Juno, he can infer that the person across from him is who that person says they are.
> 
> Benzaiten Steel.
> 
> Though, the present existence of a man long dead brings up it's own unique challenges.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No beta we die like men. - This is, technically, chapter 2. It comes after Juno's pov but before Ben's. 
> 
> But North! You say, This seems like it's set before Man in Glass but AFTER Shadow's on the Ship! How could that be possible?
> 
> First thing, all things are possible under god, so jot that down.  
> Second thing - I don't know, but it's my multiverse and I'll do what I like.
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS: This chapter contains glib mentions of teenagers dating people older than them. It does not go into detail but it is mentioned and not taken as seriously as such a thing should be. Keep safe, my lovelies!

Jet does not believe this to be necessary. 

From the observation of the last half hour and Jet's own knowledge of Juno, he can infer that the person across from him is who that person says they are.

Benzaiten Steel.

Though, the present existence of a man long dead brings up it's own unique challenges. 

Mostly, Jet feels some large amount of annoyance at Juno's loud dismissals of _Conspiracy Files_ when he has not only dealt with ancient Martian artifacts before, but knew the reality bending truth of them. 

They sit in silence. It has been ten minutes since being seated in the brig and Benzaiten Steel has not spoken, nor has he asked any questions about the small notebook placed by Jet's right hand. 

The silence is what convinced Jet that this is not some double. Anyone attempting to base an idea of what Benzaiten Steel would be like off of Juno would have no doubt also based his personality off of Juno's own. The annoying persistence. The curiosity and unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

Benzaiten, in contrast, seems comfortable with silence and stillness in a way that Jet has never seen in Juno. He looks lazily towards the camera in the corner of the room before turning back to Jet and resuming his previous position of eyeing up Jet's body lecherously. The stare in and of itself is not uncomfortable, Jet is aware that he is considered attractive and does not begrudge those who feel romantic or sexual attraction looking at him. But the expression on a face so similar to Juno's is...quite odd.

To Jet's knowledge, Juno has never looked at him that way. It is...unsettling. 

Content to sit in silence, Jet expects the stand off to continue. But he is not surprised when the intercom clicks on only a few more minutes later.

It seems Juno can be put off no longer. The fact he was able to be talked into waiting this long is likely due to the combination of Buddy, Rita and Ransom together. Patience is not in Juno's nature.

"Stop doing that with my face."

Ah, Jet is not the only one perturbed by the openly admiring looks. He can only suppose what it may feel like, to see an approximation of yourself make a face which you would never knowingly make. 

The smile Benzaiten aims at the camera is more familiar to Jet. It is not a true smile, and when he speaks he does so with a mean kind of cheerfulness. 

The phrase "kill them with kindness," comes to mind.

"It's not your face, it's mine, and it's been only mine for almost twenty years Sasha."

"Sasha?!"

"It's not really a cute look, to be taunting your allies with the faces of their dead family members, is the thing."

"Is _that_ what you think is -"

"Juno," Buddy's no-nonsense tone interrupts, "if I may remind you: direct contact is counter productive to what we are attempting here."

The intercom snaps off. 

Benzaiten turns to him, another familiar expression on his face, lips curled into a snarl and Jet is almost impressed at Juno's ability to annoy even his own twin. 

"We have come to much the same conclusion as you have, Benzaiten, if I may call you Benzaiten."

Benzaiten nods, warily. 

"Ah, good. We will ask you some verification questions provided by Juno and in turn we will allow you to ask your own verification questions which Juno will answer and relay the answers back to me via coms. Does that sound acceptable?"

"Sure, big guy. Why not. You may as well go first, if you have Juno's huge list of questions."

"I might suggest we start with your own list, as Juno has given me only one question to ask."

Benzaiten huffs out something like a laugh. He is still smiling, but again, the smile is not one of happiness and his voice contains an false tone of cheerfulness. "Oh, well then we're done here. I don't need to ask anything at all, actually. You're whole experiment has failed, just spectacularly, congratulations."

Jet frowns. "I'm afraid I don't understand," he begins and is cut off.

"I do want to know how you pulled it off, having me walk through a door and land in the irradiated desert, because that is a banger of a trick, I'll give you that, but come on! You're seriously going to sit there and tell me _Juno Steel_ only has one question. Juno. My brother, who I know? My brother, who once interrogated the whole of our sixth grade class when my dance shoes went missing, then cross referenced everyone's stories and then cross examined thirty twelve-year-old kids and then _found_ my dance shoes? That Juno?"

Hm, well. When put like that, Jet can see their supposed error. The Juno he met almost a year ago in the desert would have been exactly as Benzaiten describes. But Juno has changed much in the short time of their acquaintance, and for the better, in Jet's limited opinion.

"But sure, ask your _one_ question," Benzaiten snarks smugly, "or, wait - actually, let me guess."

He leans forward, smirking as he stares Jet down with the same sharp intelligence Juno has weaponized. "One question - you wouldn't waste it on something Sasha knows, like what our favourite kids shows were. Or where we sat in school. She might ask me why Juno punched Mr. Lowell and I may choose to answer but we all know 'he had it coming,' isn't really any answer at all...ugh!" Benzaiten looks away to aim an overwrought look of disgust up at the camera, performing for the rest of the crew now and ignoring Jet entirely. 

"Is this about his datemates? Because he stopped seeing that mob guy before our seventeenth birthday after he found out the guy was married and wanted him to be a full time mistress, and what happened to Kit was not our fault and I swear I didn't know we were smuggling Q in the presents that Eden always got him, besides which Sash, I believe _you_ were the one who introduced them, so -"

The intercom flicks back on. And Jet is thankful.

One thing both Steel's have in common, it seems, is the ability to run their mouths. Benzaiten has just given Jet...much more information about the life of Juno Steel than Jet had known or had ever wanted to know.

That their taste in illegal substances once matched up, for instance.

"Am I married?" Juno snaps, loud enough that the words echo in the suddenly empty room.

That is not the question Juno had scribbled in the notebook that sits next to Jet.

But it hits Benzaiten hard enough that he sits back in his chair, gaping incredulously up at the camera. Jet watches silently as his indignation visibly grows and his face darkens with the flush of anger, all traces of his mask of congeniality swept away. 

"Well you weren't when you _died!_ " He cries and stands abruptly, chair clattering behind him as he begins to shout at the camera in the corner as if shouting at Juno personally, all traces of the dramatis personae gone and leaving behind just a furious man powered by a grief that has never gone away. "And if I found out you married Morphe Foster just because she asked and I wasn't around to push you in front of a bus like we talked about I will finish the job mom started and kill you myself, what the actual fuck, Juno?!"

The door to the brig slides open and Jet can faintly hear Buddy's voice, sharp with exasperation and Rita's high pitched worry as Juno strides forward and does not meet so much as collides with his twin, locking his arms around him and crying openly into his shoulder.

"What the fuck," Benzaiten's voice creeps towards the same high, panicked register it had after Jet had dragged him in from the desert. "You didn't answer any of my questions, you jerk!" 

"What are you gonna do, kill me?" Juno asks, voice thick.

Benzaiten hiccups, and the bundle of limbs that is Juno-and-Benzaiten Steel seems to fold in on itself, a clinging mess of two sobbing siblings talking over one another.

As quietly as he can, Jet collects the notebook and leaves the two to their reconnection. He has decided to destroy the question Juno gave him. Given what he knows of Juno's past, it seems rude to leave it. First, he will have to talk to Buddy about their guest, and then they will have to chart a course after they have recalculated for their food and fuel stores, but until he is alone in his quarters it will live safely in his pocket, away from the Steel's fresh, unburied grief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "You dated a mobster, Mistah Steel!?"
> 
> "Look, we all do dumb things when we're sixteen okay?" Juno snaps, muffled by the hands over his face flushed dark with embarrassment. "And he was barely a mobster okay, he was a soldier and not a very good one. If he's still alive, which I doubt, he probably only ever got to enforcer status."


End file.
